About Zach

Zach is currently looking for his next challenge!
Reach out if you think he'll be a good fit for your organization.

Zach is a software developer who has worked on a range of projects, with expertise in Ruby/Rails and MySQL performance. He also tinkers with other languages in his free time (currently Go, Haskell, Scala, Clojure, and Rust).

He knows how to laugh at himself and loves to ship software. He is a father of two wonderful kids and a husband to a fantastic wife.

email ϟ github ϟ twitter ϟ linkedin

Notable Projects

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Nginx is extremely performant

A couple days ago I wrote an article about perceptions I’ve encountered as a freelancer. The article took off on Hacker News, which a great feeling.

I received several thousand page views in the process. At first I was like “Wow!” and that quickly turned into “Oh crap…” I wasn’t sure if my server hosting this blog would be able to handle that amount of traffic. But Nginx handled it like a champ.

When I setup this blog, I found an excellent How-To article on setting up Wordpress on Nginx using FastCGI from Aaron Schaefer. At the time this blog was using 5 PHP CGI processes and wasn’t using any form of Wordpress page caching, however neither memory nor CPU broke a sweat. And I’m only running on a few hundred MBs.

I don’t think Nginx is a perfect fit in every instance, however I’m really pleased with the results. I definitely recommend it to anyone else who is on the fence.